Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2018 i The American Poetry Review

from M Notebooks there are moments when terror breaksinto something brighter & the brighterthought cocoons the mind sea will listenfor immigrants, refugeesover which a message travelssubstance between continentsfor migrations, traders, mapmakersover which a person fleesover which a quest unfolds, a question Mendieta who had to fly over the oceana grieve ability, a grave able place hollow of a torso, fill it with animal bloodgunpowder, feathers, mudlook how it un-things a person Silueta silhouette for the feeling of in-front-ofsilhouette for the feeling of during, of uponhere: a beneath silhouette, an along silhouettesilhouette for instead-ofsilhouette for the feeling of in-spite-of find a river amongyour major organs: windpipeor somesuch throughway add diver birds, add floating tiresadd cordgrass, add glass now a wondrous wideningtrail of roil-water aftera ship as it sails farther& more violently…

I … An axe for the frozen sea within us. —Franz Kafka Poetry can be healing in two ways that I think everyone recognizes. Reading poems can be healing for the reader in need of solace; writing poems can be healing for the writer in need of release from fear, shame, guilt, and repression. But what do we mean by healing? To heal is not the same as to cure; it is more mysterious, more ambiguous. The etymology of the word tells us that “heal” is from old English and Proto-German words meaning “make whole.” But then—what do we mean by wholeness? Ten years ago, my husband was in hospital with a vulnerable heart for a week, a week I had trouble sleeping. The nurses made a bed for me…

Scabs I spend so much time lookingat scars in the mirror I sometimes forget aboutmy scabs—recent, tender. The othermorning, when the sun made the third-floorclassroom feel like springhad broken like a stick cracked over a knee, a student scratched her leg until a scabfrom some impossible mosquitobite ruptured, a darksome blood-burn sinkinglike a spring down into her brie-whitesocks where it pinked, spreading. Sometimes I thinkabout those lace-cuffedanklets my grandmother made me wear with black Mary Janes each Easter— the way they made me feellike Hermes when a breezecaught them and fluttered at my heels. My body has always been paganin its rituals—all bloodand the goat’s heads of its dreams. I once had to sagea new house in which I move my superstitions from room to room like a broom, dusting…

Unable are the Loved to dieFor Love is Immortality—Emily Dickinson WHEN I THINK OF DAVE “LEFTY” Bonanno, immediately the title sequence of the HBO series The Sopranos, complete with theme song, pops into my head. Instead of Tony Soprano driving through the Lincoln Tunnel from New York past various landmarks to his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, Dave would be in a car headed in the other direction—from Caldwell, New Jersey (the next town over and his actual hometown) toward New York, then south to Philadelphia, where he’d pull up to the offices of The American Poetry Review on Broad Street, a few blocks from City Hall, ready to make decisions about which poems would be sent to sleep with the fishes. I met Dave in the early ’90s…

posthumous* love poem 5 the catwas nota thought we hadbefore the cat—the picture of my facedeep in yoursan up-close approaching facea facenosesketched briefly on yourpaper aslips too close and as will allowto hold, now onlyin the folds behind yourfaceness in thepossible few waysin whichto which everything had tohave colorso I had color everything hadshape so I heldmy place with shapeeverything hadto move so we trippedto our real-timetwo-step, our motion bornethrough toesfrom a world pushingus finallythrough its space and thenyes, outof its only very mind translation of posthumous* love poem 5 Each time we rested.Our heads on our.Heads or leaned. In to face the face.Of our other face to.Try to climb in with. Lips on lips we.Found no way through.But turned each. Other redder in.The making everything.Everything. Had had shape.So I…

You are not a Quaker farmerand I have no prophetic anklewe can trust. But the way your readingfinger rides the pageis not unlikea harrowand this makes allmy mineralskeen. It is strange labor—building dirt in the dark. We’ve learned the annular viewssquarely. Cropped to the pointof symbol—this the gyroscopethat the bystandernot wavingat the hot-air balloonwhere we now live. It need not be a child staring outof a charcoal suit.It need not portend.We can see noone knowshow to die and we will bear the soundthe world betweenwe will find thatsomething shudders backback from out of allwe’ve never been. TIMOTHY O’KEEFE is the author of You Are the Phenomenology, winner of the 2017 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays…

Magic Grow Dear avocado, I keepseeing myself in your pit’s solitude. I keep peelingback your skin like a nicotinepatch, like a birth control patch, or whateverelse we use to evictthe body’s desires. It’s January 3,and suddenly it mattersthat I can’t stop staring at birds of preyor identifying with the shards of pepperminton a chocolate bar.I’ve been teaching master classeson leaving parties early, dreaming not of lemonsbut their rinds. I can’t get myselfto exercise, though it’s true my tongueruns with scissors,runs like tights on a woman who wants a manto peel her tights off, her legsshaved and lotioned, her toenails paintedthe color of a national park.Maybe this year, I’ll get my grandmothera cat named Svetlana. I’ll singto the feathers in my parka, lean in to the radio’sdeep kiss. I want the…

for Cyd Taurus charges in the dark like Oregon,horns the width of this beer with a moon. I forget where I live, keep repeating your name.Its grey dissolve in rain at night is fair. Paradise Ridge fogged in breath is bad healthand ice-lungs of pine. Orion is a butterfly turned on its wing, pinned against boredomand black paper. Our bodies cut askew, shiver up and to the west, ricochetedand charcoal-burnt as maps. The myth of beasts unseen, animations on the night: Fronds of bracken hung like hairof the subway cellist, legs spread and hugging; The boxer’s head thrown back,nose bloody gushing stars; The young woman breastfeeding who’s fallen asleep;Gaunt man seated, finger raised, recalls certain beauty of youth; Your birthmarklike a thin fox torn across the sky. And what of…

The intimates In the stalls, we ladies heareach other pee. I watch herfeet. Unashamedly, sheunrolls the toilet paper, thrump, thrump, thrump.Her shoes aresturdy beige—perhaps she’s a librarian?She definitely has a job!—and she peessolidly, in a forceful streamthat ends with a quick,assured finish. As my writing changes, I think with sorrow of those who couldn’t change I am thinking with sorrow of those who couldn’t change,of those who committed suicide, Plath, Sexton, Berryman,of Hemingway with the gun in his mouth;of Ralph Ellison who would not support young black writers—they weren’t good enough, he said,not as good as he was—but who never finished his second book;of Anatole Broyard, who couldn’t write the autobiographical novelthat he had been paid to writebecause he couldn’t write the first truth—that all those years he had been…

Phosphorus Is it true then that Berlin is a city you write yourself againstRather than like New York or Paris which write themselvesinto youThat the city itself has no voice or if it has one it agrees to muteitself against the noise of your own life Or is it a chorus of voices sedimentedA voice in which the present life is overlaidon voices from historyAn aural palimpsestGhost town with golden cobblestones to stumble upon For example on this night seven years ago I was getting readyto go to a party where ready to dancewe ended up not dancing but talkingabout how far awayFrom our families we all were Where I put my arm around my friends to try to keep themIn my life but didn’t we scatter like people scatterOne…

Dog Star Rising “I’ll be doggone” —Harryette Mullen Kalel, Brooklyn landing: resplendent& vainglorious in your raw silk suit,your striped sweat socks: How many thousandmoons have gone since that last apocalypse:bright skin, a barnacle rocking alongthe bellies of those ships: Don’t plunderremind the others of soup, but more meaty,that dark monkey, & more black milk—Igot my bead on a breaded satellite, a sparrow:But wasn’t there some second ark: woodwind& muscle, one of burnished gold—Comeon, man: where’s Nietzsche: you searchedfrom sonar to lunar for the angel of history,didn’t you do everything you were told? for Douglas Kearney (a.k.a. Astronaut Jones) Prince George’s County did you know they havethese cutouts in the backseat,are molded like big cup holders,spill proof, so once handcuffed,you can still relax. the officer evenapologizes just before he palmsthe crown…

Prayer Dear Lord, for years I have prayedthe way a rabbit runs from a dog.Dear Lord, I am tired. I would like to prayby looking hard, say, at the wavering stripeof sun on the gray ocean. I wouldlike to pray by carrying a wolf spiderto the yard in a juice glass. Lord, I don’t knowabout this feudal nomenclature. Whoseinvention is that? I would like to prayto you as River. Or Adirondacks. OrThat Moment My Son Called A Cicada ShellMy Little Guy. Or Mysterious Deepand Moving. I hope you don’t thinkthat’s sacrilege—believe me when I sayI think I’ll hear you better if I capitalizemore. Please forgive me. I am afraidand my fear has crept like kudzu.There is a pun to make here aboutthis futile nomenclature, but I don’t wantto make it.…

“THE POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS before me,” said Freud, “discovered the unconscious…. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious could be studied.” He and his analytical brethren drew their descriptions of how the psyche works from two sources: their own case studies, and from poetry and literature. In those narratives and poems, they sought to identify the myths, patterns, compulsions and desires which structure human nature and narrate the human condition. Thus Hamlet and Oedipus; thus Richard III and the inferiority complex. What Freud perhaps did not guess was that psychoanalysis itself would, in the twentieth century, stamp its narratives into contemporary literature; that poets and fiction writers would adopt, imitate and reproduce the insights of psychoanalysts in the making of their fictions. Given the tools and…

This is how it was. She was eight feet tall if she was an inch, legslike Christmas hams, breasts like windmills, like volcanoes, tectoniccatastrophes. She burned up villages and swallowed roads. She took my hand and said, I’m going to show you everything. We went among the barns. It was the solstice and the night was minuteslong. And hot—the chickens were dropping fried eggs in their coops,the horses sweating glue. One of those nights the moon leaves yousunburned. We made something like love, but without the story. Friction like trainsderailing, like a horde of locusts. There was no letting go. The howlingwe made woke up Moses himself and he said, Part! Only that one word could have done it. Her eyes were galactic spotlights.Steam pouring out of her mouth and…

REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SO-CALLED Polish School of Poetry, mainly Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski, are the most visible Polish poets translated and published in the U.S. Although not all of them follow the poetics favored by Miłosz, the leading practitioner of the aforementioned poetic style, which is characterized by historical and philosophical exploration, they do not stray too far from it, either. As critic Joanna Niżyńska reminds us, the Polish poetry canon in America, just as any other canon, “is subject to political and economic considerations that drive the market for translations, changes in educational curriculum that render some authors more desirable than others, and, ultimately, a cultural tendency to reinforce rather than challenge the familiar understandings of foreign literatures” (7). It is largely due to…

Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale It was always me in that shaggy suit jacket,the battered dance shoes, the fuck-you-rich-boypompadour. When you cannot wailyour rain-shot, neon-blasted loveto the red-headed girls of the world,Otis Redding is your only recourse,your body rigid with borrowed soul.Who knows better than another womanto try a little tenderness?Only the weary girls understand this.Only the ones making knife-brimmed stylefrom what the dead throw away.Only the ones with a ready wisecrackfor each of the thousand heartbreaksthat crackle across the unrequited radio.Dames, we sigh, sipping the long lightin the unmowed front yard,our hidden breasts swaying undersecondhand shirts like palm trees.Isn’t she—? asks the light. Isn’t she, we reply. Because my grief was a tree It forgave the dog that pissed on itIt moderated quarrels between the stonesIt had a few knots…

Equinox As we lie here, the peacocksthrow down their criesof oiled ribbon and hot waxthrough the hydraulic night while Ursa Majorloops your nameacross one black postcardafter another. The rhododendronsare speaking in tongues.The sea has lost countof its dead. Along the ridge of your body,the music of trace chains,the light of the plough. The alders raise their mastsand hammer outtheir ancient telegrams. On the floor,in my shirt pocket,are eight metric boltscalling outto some lost machineof winter. Property The deer cut a thin pathfrom the creek,through the field,along the crooked teethof the fence,past the stiff earsof the mule pen,and into the underbrushat the wood’s edge. The pipeline surveyorshave trespassedagain, and againI gather their bright flags. The moon gathersevidence against usand waits for its moment. The path crawls from the creeklike a sentencestarting…

Hearts Amiss How wrong it was to look at those hearts incisedin maples and birches with a lovingarrow between them, especially when the treegrew larger and the hearts expandedthe way they do and love took over the treeand we said, “Here’s another” and our own heartsbroke in two with envy and regretbut what we didn’t know then was they were emblems,signs, of something deeper and more discordantfor they—the lovers—had turned to sacrificeand torn the other’s heart out from its mooringsand held the wet organ in their own hands,loose and disconnected from the strings,the hearts of lovers deeply separatedfrom what were once such arrows of desire,and some were painted red on buried stonesplanted in the ground like broken teeth. No Kissing There It wasn’t only Eleanor I kissedbut de Beauvoir with…

The Rabbit On his deathbed, the dictatororders the executionof all the watchmakers.It’s OK to laugh at him,but he’s no different than youor me. One day, our mothersalso set us down and neverpicked us up again, and no onerecovers from being a child,because a child never thinksThis is the last time I’ll wearthese shoes with the red stripe.Scribes used to scrape the inkfrom the page and start over.And anyone who remembersthe person who rememberswhat was first written on the pagehas been dead for centuries.Ninety-three-point-six percent of adulthoodis believing If I could just have those shoeswith the red stripe again, I’d be happy.Sometimes we bulldozethe ruins of an ancient cityto build a shopping mall.And sometimes we bulldozea shopping mall to make wayfor another shopping mall.When my pocket turns outempty, I want to…

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Listof Further Possibilities by Chen ChenBOA Editions, 2017, 96 pages IN LATE SEPTEMBER I DROVE DOWN 1-5 SOUTH from Seattle to California with a rice cooker in the front seat and everything else I owned in the back. When I pulled out of the driveway my mother said, “It’s not too late to let me come with you.” I kissed her through the window, slept in the backseat of my car and washed my hair with hand soap in public restrooms. The first night I spent at a friend of a friend’s house in Portland. The second night with my feet dipped in a public pool reading Chen Chen. By the third night I was flirting with waitresses and only driving…

A big storm like this used tothrill me, a visit from a god, 36 inches and still snowing! But now I know about the greatfloating continents of plastic twice the size of the US,in the Atlantic and Pacific both, and their spawn the micro-beads, so although the laden woods lookmuch as they did when I was born, snow is a mock-consecration to me now. Still, it’s a thrill to see the human worldstruck dumb and whited out, an ocean of motionless waves, no cars, no lights, no music,only the illusion of earth as it was before I understoodit was I who had made it a god. In summer Russell and Ihunt for chanterelles, which the snailswill devour if they find them first, and scavenge a few high ledgesfor inky wild…